everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Tag: advertising

  • What I learned at ad:tech

    What I learned at ad:tech

    What a difference a year makes! Last year is seemed as if blogs were only given a polite nod and tolerated as something vaguely interesting but mostly for the geek fringe. The majority of the attention was given over to the SEO black arts. This year blogs are a given while the social media darlings of YouTube & MySpace are the focus of everyone’s attention.

    Worth the price of admission alone was one of the panelists (I think it was Dave Evans of Digital Voodoo) who defined Social Media as, “communication and media that doesn’t require interruption.” That is so true! Successful advertising in social media is not a pop-up ad for an irrelevant product – it cannot get in the way of what I want to do or who I want to reach. Successful integration of a brand into social media is going to facilitate the conversation. It’s going to be that funny clip that I can use to reach out to someone, it’s going to be images that I want to associate with by adding them onto my blog sidebar, it’s going to be a service that allows me to connect or communicate in a way that I couldn’t before.

    Other notables:

    Garrick Schmitt from avenue a/razorfish said that, “the tag cloud will become the mullet of web 2.0.”

    This was funny because I ran into the father of the term “folksonomy” a couple of days earlier and he was going off on how tag clouds are overrated (he’s now posted about it).

    Shawn Gold from MySpace on perspective, “To us, the refrigerator is the refrigerator. To our grandparents it was technology.”

    It may seem strange to call MySpace a messaging platform but that is exactly how it’s being used. I heard of one music promoter who has so many friend requests that he has hired someone to manage his profile for him. This doesn’t sound so strange if you think that people hire others to answer & screen phone calls as well. I also met someone who has a 500 friend profile and he was asked if he would sell his profile. This did seem odd to me – I never thought I’d see a social network commoditized as if it was a World of Warcraft character being sold on e-Bay.

    Shocking stat of the show: World of Warcraft has 5 million users as of Sept. 2005 and currently something north of 6 million today. The typical user plays 27 hours/week and most of these users will stay on the platform for over two years.

    Cool mobile app: Mobot – turn your camera phone into an image recognition device. I saw a demo where a guy took a picture of a Coke can and it recognized the logo and went to a special landing page on the phone’s browser.

  • Video Advertising – two approaches

    Apple announced today that it will run graphical ads in the lower-left hand corner of the iTunes product as users listen to podcasts on their PC. Advertising Age goes on to write that this will help offset the costs of producing and hosting podcasts. Everyone will be looking at this closely.

    In other news, I’ve been pointed to another version of advertising, one that comes from and is amplified by the community. Here’s the Firefox Flicks community on “other browsers” in Wheee!

  • Just call me Ambassador

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    Back in December I got an email from Sprint asking if I’d like to try out a new phone and service that they are rolling out in North America. Half thinking it might be a way to get me to switch providers (I use Verizon), I read through the fine print looking for a catch. When I didn’t see any reason not to take them up on their offer for a free new phone and free service, I threw caution to the wind and signed up. The folks at Sprint/Nextel had read this blog and were interested in getting my input.

    As a qualified participant, we will send you one Sprint Power Vision phone and provide you with six months of all-access service (at no charge). You’ll have access to the Sprint Music Store(SM) live TV broadcasts, gaming and more. Yes, you will also have unlimited free calling and data service. It’s a pretty good deal and all we ask for in return is your candid feedback (you decide how much and how often).

    OK, I can’t be bought off that easily. I have been testing out the service for the past few months and will give you what I think of the service straight up. As you read my review, understand that I also am not a huge cell phone user. Sure, I use the things like anyone else and lived 10 years in Tokyo where the things are damn near an extention of your body. Yet here in the US I am bathed in wifi both at home and all over the Yahoo campus at work so see little need to bring up a small screen stream of the latest headlines except to impress colleagues or make a point about the future of mobility.

    Read on for the in-depth review:

    (more…)

  • Creating a fake invite for a fictitious event

    After a mocked up invite to a "secret" Apple press event was found out to be false, the brilliant minds over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog dreamed up a contest with their readers to submit the best design concepts as comments to their blog. Apple fans are diehard rumor mongers who also have the best graphic design software at their fingertips so the quality of submissions are quite good.

    Added bonus is that with all the linking (69 as of now) and trackbacks this post has created, I’m sure that this post will eventually bubble up the rankings for TUAW over their competition the next time anyone searches on "apple rumor."

    Here’s a test – today a search on Yahoo shows the following:

    1. Appleinsider.com
    2. Rumor Has It (an apple.com trailer)
    3. crazyapplerumors.com
    4. appleturns.com
    5. thinksecret.com

    Google’s basically got the same list (minus the apple.com trailer) but same story, TUAW isn’t on the first page of results.

    Check back in a few weeks and let’s see if anything changes.

  • Put them in a box and keep ’em there.

    I really should go to bed as I’ve got an early commute tomorrow but I can’t stop playing with Think Tank.

    As a publicity stunt, Yahoo! Australia has put a few ad execs in a box and pointed a bunch of web cams at them as they scrum their way through ad campaign ideas for products submitted by users. It’s especially good fun because you can type messages and post pictures that will flash on a wall in Sydney seconds later. The real challenge is to then tune into the sound-enabled webcam to listen and see if you can get a reaction from two people in the room, on the other side of the world. I know what I’m doing with my son this weekend!

    From the site:

    Yahoo! Think Tank puts some of Australia and New Zealand’s leading creative minds under your control. Between the 3rd and 17th of November 2005, put this resource to work on any brief you can imagine, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Submit a brief online, control their working environment, judge their creative output and watch every minute of it live online.

    Need an idea for a pitch? Submit an idea.

  • Spam Blogs and Financial Incentive

    Technorati’s Niall Kennedy posts about the recent spate of spam blogs coming out of Google’s Blogger service and describes Google’s Blogger and Adsense service as parts of a spam suite. BoingBoing first posted Niall’s theory that CAPTCHA’s are no longer a valid block and are circumvented by spammers who redirect the test to eager seekers of free porn. What’s more troubling is that there is no immediate financial incentive for Google to thwart the creation of spam blogs. For every successful spam blog created, the revenue line for Adsense goes up a notch.

    Big ol’ disclosure here because I work at Yahoo which is equally concerned and vulnerable with spam. In the interest of generating public debate, I want to throw out this question. Not only am I interested in how spam blog creation can be stopped (more interested in how to take away the incentive to splog, not how to block them), but also interested in the problem of click fraud. The incentive to create a splog is further accelerated with the creation of specialized crawlers that would click all your ad links and generate immediate click-thru revenues along with the more insidious use of zombie networks reported today by Joel on Software.

    What can we do to ensure that the tools we have available to communicate and connect are not pulled apart by greedy individuals using automated tools to gain a quick buck? I know it has something to do with authority and trust. Why do we trust our savings with First National Bank at a swank downtown address and not Ed’s Bank in the trailer on the edge of town? Just as we bank at what is most likely a marble-faced edifice in the physical world, is there anyway to add these same clues to reputation in the virtual world?

  • Search Engine Strategies

    I’m off to San Jose tomorrow morning for the Search Engine Strategies show to cruise the floor, meet up with folks, and see what’s up in the world of Search Engine Optimization.

    While on the topic of internet marketing, I thought I’d point out a particularly clever bit of interactive marketing. Instead of floating obnoxiously in front of what you want to read, this interstitial ad tugs playfully at the corner of the screen until you click on it and it tears down the entire page like a magazine. I thought it was pretty cool until it crashed my Firefox browser, twice.

    I’m not sure how long this ad from Computer Associates is going to run but here’s the link to the page.

  • “Blogging” as a hook

    Airbag notes that Gateway is now using “blogging” as reason to buy a new computer.

    Amazing how in less than five years blogging has replaced gaming, video editing, and homework as the criteria of choice for purchasing a computer.

    Put another tick on the checklist of what it takes to go mainstream. What’s next?

  • The Fine Art of Search Engine Marketing

    I dropped by the recent OMMA (Online Media, Marketing and Advertising) conference here in San Francisco and got a healthy education on some of the finer points of search engine marketing. What was most startling to me was the finding by one of the panel members (it might have been Geoff Ramsey of eMarketer, he was throwing a lot of stats around) that the ROI for most search engine campaigns is now up to $1.50 for each dollar invested. The significance of this was not lost on the audience. Search Engine advertising is no longer a marketing expense but a sales channel.

    I may be stating the obvious to some of you but this struck me as significant. When a traditional marketing activity moves from the expense column of a balance sheet to the revenue side, it completely changes how management views this activity.

    I had the good fortune to catch up with Joshua Stylman of Reprise Media and he explained to me some of the things that Reprise is doing to optimize marketing for their clients. Reprise also runs the Movable Type-powered blog, SearchViews so they’re drinking their own sherry (it tastes better than dogfood)

    For The New York Times, they analyze the top stories from the RSS feeds to make selective keyword purchases to drive readers to the nytimes.com site.

    For a Lord of the Rings merchandiser, they spider their client’s site to extract product names and use them in combination with general phrases related to Lord of the Rings to bid on "tail terms" which are extremely specific and thus low cost but highly effective and relevant. The case study (registration required) goes on to quote attaining a 1:6 ratio of ad dollars spent to every dollar generated!

    I don’t know about you but if I had a campaign that returned $6 for every dollar spent, I don’t think there would be any doubt in my not looking to maximize resources spent on that channel.

    I found the tenor of this conference refreshing. Unlike other conferences which had the feel of a shrill carnival, this one was more in tune to the art of good advertising; the importance of creating something that is of value to not only the advertiser but, equally important, the consumer. I appreciate that there are companies out there that are taking the time to work out phrases that will find me exactly those things out on the tail that I might want. Spend your money to optimize the tail, relevance will trump brute force "Punch the Monkey" schemes every time. Anyone remember the x10 camera?